Scott Gammans wrote:
> 
> >So there may indeed be a memory leak occurring when you render
> >animations with POVRay that need to load a lot of images.
> 
> Yes, that is exactly, EXACTLY the behavior I have seen in the past.
> 
> >The solution
> >would probably be not to reload image maps for each scene but to keep
> >them in memory.
> 
> Would you mind explaining what you mean by that? Is this a suggestion for
> the POV-Ray developers for the next version of POV-Ray, or are you
> suggestion a technique that I can implement using the SDL? And if it's the
> latter, please provide a brief SDL example of what you are talking about.
> 
> Many thanks...

It's a solution I used in the program I mentioned. It had to load
graphics data continuously and the only way I could solve it is to load
everything only one time and then keep it in memory.
For a POVRay animation render that would mean that it would keep
imagemaps and such in memory until the end of the render instead of
loading them for each frame, but to be honest I don't know how POVRay
handles things now, I'm only assuming it doesn't do this already.

So, obviously, this is not a solution you can achieve with the SDL. It
may only help to know that cutting down on the image loading *might*
help.

What puzzles me is how this could occur on Mac as well though...
When I ran into this problem and found that the cause wasn't in my own
code (eliminating almost all of it didn't solve it) I figured that it
was something in the way Windows (98 at the time) handles files. 
Now I think that it could also have been somewhere in between (the code
that loads and decodes the images); I realize this seems vague, but I
didn't get any further then that... :)

Remco

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